Yesterday a consulting lead came through and I viewed the company's site on my mobile device. Very illustrative indeed! For whatever reason that showed me a lot of the hidden junk they'd stuffed on the page. I immediately decided against working with them.

Getting back to my laptop and taking more time to view the source code only confirmed my decision. Code like "input type= hidden" and "class=stealth" feels like it's begging to find its way into a Matt Cutts PowerPoint, guaranteed to get laffs at the "what not to do" seminars.

The company also had four more kinds of metadata than necessary in the document head, stuffed full of the exact same kinds of keywords in an overkill type scenario. Looks like something someone sold to someone, telling them it would get them somewhere.

Granted, most of what this prospect was looking for was paid search -- but experience has shown that companies doing so much deceptive stuff are hard to talk to in general. They may say one thing and mean another. Why listen to someone who says "oh yeah, we really want to go legit" when there are plenty of folks out there who say it and mean it?

In some cases you do have a company that is mortified that their SEO company did all that stuff, and they're looking for someone to genuinely help them go legit. In which case, it shouldn't be all that hard to get off on the right foot: there is plenty of field space in our lead forms over at Page Zero to explain background situations like "hey by the way, we know there is a lot of black hat code on our site right now -- this is not our philosophy at all, and we are seeking to hire you because we know you are reputable and we are looking for a firm that will do things right."